Vox

by Christina Dalcher

  I watched them, these women, taking turns to ogle each other’s baby, pointing at their hearts and temples in a silent pidgin. I watched them finger spell next to a pyramid of oranges, laughing when they fucked up one of the letters they probably hadn’t signed since the sixth grade when they passed messages about Kevin or Tommy or Carlo. I watched them stare in horror as three uniformed men approached, I watched the pyramid of oranges tumble when the women tried to resist, and I watched them being led out of the automatic doors, them and their baby girls, each of the four with a wide metal cuff on her wrist.

  I haven’t inquired after them, of course. But I don’t have to. I’ve never seen those women or their babies since.

  “Bye,” Sonia says, and hops onto the bus.

  I walk back to the door, shake out the umbrella on the porch, and stand it to dry. The locked mailbox with its single slit of a mouth seems to grin at me. See what you’ve done, Jean?

  Our postman’s truck stops at the corner and he gets out, swathed in one of those clear plastic raincoats the post office issues for inclement weather. He looks like he’s wearing a condom.

  My friend Ann Marie and I used to laugh at the mailmen on rainy days, snickering at their shorts and silly pith helmets during summer, at their galoshes slurping through slush in the winter months. Mostly, we laughed at the plastic raincoats because they reminded us of the getups little old ladies wore. Still wear. Some things haven’t changed. Although we don’t have female postal workers anymore. I suppose that’s an enormous change.

  “Morning, Mrs. McClellan,” he says, sloshing up the walk toward the house. “Lotsa mail today.”

  I almost never see our mailman. He has a knack for coming when I’m out of the house running errands or inside taking a shower. Occasionally, if I’m in the kitchen, I’ll hear the dull metallic thud of the mailbox flap while I’m working my way through a second cup of coffee. I wonder if he plans his timing.

  I answer him with a smile and hold my hand out, just to see what he’ll do.

  “Sorry, ma’am. I gotta put the mail in the mailbox. Rules, you know.”

  They do have these new rules, except if Patrick is around on Saturday mornings. Then our ever-rule-abiding mailman puts the letters in Patrick’s hand. Saves my husband the trouble of having to go hunt for the key, I guess.

  I watch the mailbox swallow a stack of envelopes and clank its mouth shut.

  “You have a nice day, now, Mrs. McClellan. If you can in this weather.”

  The automatic reply catches in my throat with seconds to spare.

  And then it happens: he blinks three times, each close of his eyes punctuated by an absurdly long pause, like a mechanical batting of lashes. “I have a wife, you know. And three girls.” This last emerges in a whisper as the mailman—What was his name? Mr. Powell? Mr. Ramsey? Mr. Banachee? I warm with embarrassment at not knowing even the name of this man who visits our house six days a week.

  He does it again, the eye thing, not before checking over my shoulder for the porch camera and lining himself up so I’m eclipsing its lens. Am I the sun or the moon? Probably Pluto, the un-planet.

  And I recognize him. My mailman is the son of the woman who should have been the first human to get the anti-aphasia shot, Delilah Ray. It’s no wonder he was so worried about my fees last year, which would have amounted to exactly zero if I’d ever reached the trial stage of my Wernicke X-5 serum; he can’t be pulling in much as a postal worker.

  I liked the man. He had a sensitivity about him when he brought Delilah Ray in to see me, along with a child’s sense of wonder at the magic potion I proposed to inject into her brain. Family members of other patients had been awestruck, but this man was the only person who cried when I told him my projections, explained that if the trial went well, the old woman would speak her first coherent words after a year of post-stroke linguistic confusion. In this man’s eyes, I wasn’t simply another scientist or speech therapist in a long line of diagnosticians and do-gooders. I was a god who could bring back lost voices.

  Was.

  Now he looks at me questioningly, expectantly, so I do the only thing I can: I raise my left hand to my face, turning the counter outward.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  Before he leaves the porch to plod back to his mail truck, I close and open my eyes, three times, as he did.

  “We’ll talk another time,” he says. It’s only a whisper. And then he goes.

  Off to my right, a door slams, its tinny aluminum double tapping on the frame. Olivia King, hidden by a paisley umbrella, emerges from the shelter of her porch. The scarf around her head is plain pink silk, or polyester. It gives her the air of a grandmother, although Olivia is at least a decade younger than I am. She checks the skies, puts a hand out, and closes the umbrella.

  She does not take off the scarf before stepping from the porch and folding herself into the front seat of her car. Weekday mornings are the only times Olivia drives anymore; if her church were closer, she’d walk.

  In this moment, Olivia seems small, almost shrunken, a house mouse scuttling from one refuge to another, fearful of what might lie in wait along her trajectory. She’s what Jackie would have called a Kool-Aid head, content with her place in the hierarchy: God, man, woman. Olivia had drunk up the poison, every last drop.

  My own repertoire of religious doctrine is shit, which is how I like it. But when Steven first came home with his reading from that AP course—an innocent-sounding title, Fundamentals of Modern Christian Philosophy, blazoned on the cover, innocuous blue lettering on a white background—I leafed through the book after dinner.

  “Pretty lame, isn’t it?” Steven said on his second trip to the kitchen’s snack cabinet.

  “They’re mainstreaming this next year? That’s what you said, right?” I asked. My eyes didn’t stray from the page, a chapter titled “In Search of a Natural Order in the Modern Family.” The chapter, like all the others, was preceded by a biblical quote; this one, from Corinthians, informed the reader that “The head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.”

  Fantastic.

  Further along, chapter twenty-seven began with this nugget from the book of Titus: “Be teachers of good things; teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands.” The gist of the text was a call to arms of sorts, a reaching out to older generations of women.

  There were chapters on feminism and its insidious deconstruction of Judeo-Christian values (as well as manhood), advice for men on their roles in husbanding and parenting, guidance for children on respecting their elders. Every page screamed extreme-right fundamentalism.

  I slammed the book shut. “Tell me this isn’t the only required reading.”

  “That’s the book,” Steven said after he downed a mason jar of milk and refilled it halfway.

  “So the point of this class is, what? Highlighting the pitfalls of conservative Christianity?”

  He stared at me blankly, as if I’d just asked the question in Greek. “I don’t know. The teacher’s cool. And she makes some good points. You know, like about how hard it is on kids when both their parents work, how we’ve gotten to this place where people forget about simple things.”

  I put the milk back into the fridge. “How about you save some of this for your brothers’ breakfast? And what simple things?” A slide show played in my head: women gardening, women canning peaches, women embroidering pillowcases by candlelight. Shakers abstaining themselves out of existence.

  “Like, well, gardening and cooking and stuff like that. Instead of running around working dumb jobs.”

  “You think I should garden and cook more? You think the work I do is less important than—I don’t know—crafts?”

  “Not you, Mom. Other women. The ones who just w
anna get out of the house and have some kind of identity.” He picked up the book and kissed me goodnight. “Anyway, it’s just a stupid class.”

  “I wish you’d drop it,” I said.

  “No way, José. I need the AP credits for college.”

  “Why? So you can major in modern Christian thought?”

  “No. So I can get into college.”

  And that was how they did it. Sneaking in a course here, a club there. Anything to lure kids with promises of increasing their competitiveness.

  Such a simple thing, really.

  NINE

  The president’s wife is next to him on the screen, a few steps back and to his right, her blond hair covered by a delicate mauve scarf that matches her dress and sets off her eyes.

  I don’t know why I turn on the television. By the time I’ve reheated my coffee, the rain has started beating a steady, wet rhythm again, so I don’t much feel like going out. Also, it’s safer here at home, by myself. No temptation to speak.

  She’s a beauty, the first lady. Almost a reincarnation of Jackie O, only fair and blue-eyed instead of dark. I remember her from before she married, when she decorated the pages of Vogue and Elle, almost always modeling low-cut and high-cropped swimwear or lingerie, smiling out from the magazines as if to say, Go ahead. Touch me.

  Now, watching her stand placidly behind her husband, I’m struck by the change. A metamorphosis, really. She appears shorter, but maybe that’s because of a footwear choice. The president is not very tall, and one supposes there’s an aesthetic issue at play, as if the photographers decided to even out their frames, smoothing the peaks and valleys of their subjects.

  Who am I kidding?

  She’s never smiling anymore, never wearing anything that falls less than three inches below her knees or that’s cut lower than just at the bottom of that concavity on her throat, the one I can never remember the name of. Supra-something notch. Her sleeves are unfailingly three-quarters length, like today, and the counter on her left wrist matches her dress exactly. It looks like a piece of antique jewelry, a gift from a great-grandmother.

  The first lady is supposed to be our model, a pure woman, steadfast at her husband’s side in all things, at all times.

  Of course, she’s at his side only during public events. When the cameras click off and the microphones are muted, Anna Myers, née Johansson, is promptly escorted back to her home by a trio of armed Secret Service agents. This is never filmed, but Patrick has been in attendance at more than one of the president’s appearances.

  The trio stays with her night and day.

  In other times, this constant supervision of the first lady would be accepted as routine security for her protection. The truth, however, is in Anna Myers’ blue eyes; they have the vacant, lusterless quality of a woman who now sees the world in shades of gray.

  There was a girl in my dorm, five doors down on the left, who had Anna’s eyes. It seemed the muscles around them never moved, never contracted and stretched to match the smile she wore when we asked if she was okay, if she felt better this morning, if she wanted to talk. I remember when we found her body, eyes open and dull, like country wells or puddles of spilled coffee. If you want to know what depression looks like, all you need to do is look into a depressed person’s eyes.

  Strange how I can remember the dead girl’s eyes but not her name.

  Anna Myers lives in a prison with rose gardens and marble bathrooms and two-thousand-thread-count sheets on the bed. Patrick told me about her, after one of his visits as a favor to President Myers, about how the Secret Service men check Anna’s bathroom twice a day, how they search her bed for objects that might have migrated unseen from the kitchen, how they hold her prescription meds and dole out pills one at a time. There are no liquor bottles in Anna’s home, no locks on the doors except for those of the storage cupboard where the housekeeping supplies are. Nothing in her house is made of glass.

  I switch the channel.

  We still have cable, more than one hundred choices of sports, garden shows, cooking demos, home restoration, cartoons for the children, some movies. All the movies are PG—no horror, a smattering of light comedy, those four-hour epics about Moses and Jesus. Then there are the other channels, but they’re all password protected, viewable only by the head of household and males over eighteen. No one needs much imagination to guess what kinds of shows are on these channels.

  Today, I choose golf: pure boredom involving a metal stick and a ball.

  When my coffee is cold and the leading player reaches the eighteenth hole, the doorbell rings. It’s an unusual occurrence during the day. I mean, what would be the point? The only people who aren’t out at work are women, and what would they do? Sit in silence and watch golf? Company only draws attention to what we no longer have.

  I realize I’m still wearing my robe when I open the door and find Olivia, pink scarf knotted tightly around her head, not a shred or wisp of curl peeking out.

  She checks me over, a slow, disapproving look from my neck to my feet, and holds out a nearly empty sack of sugar and a measuring cup.

  I nod. If it weren’t still pissing rain, I’d let her wait on the porch while I take the cup into the kitchen and pour sugar into it. Instead, I motion for her to step inside, out of the wet.

  Olivia follows me to the kitchen, and the stack of dirty breakfast dishes receives the same frown my bathrobe did at the front door. I’d like to slap her, or at least tell her what I think of her sanctimonious attitude. When I take the measuring cup from her hands, she grasps my wrist. Olivia’s hands are cold, moist from the rain.

  I expect some sound, some uppity, self-righteous little “Hm,” but she says nothing, only regards my counter, its ceaseless blinking of the three-digit number.

  She actually smiles, and the smile brings back a memory of another day, another unexpected doorbell ring, another request for a cup of sugar, a half-pint of milk, an egg.

  “Mind if I sit a minute?” Olivia said two years ago, not waiting for a yes before she planted her ample bottom on the sofa in the den. I’d left the TV on, tuned to some talk show or another, while I waded through final exam blue books. Jackie Juarez was going head-to-head with three women, each of them dressed like a cross between Donna Reed and an Apollo-era astronaut’s wife.

  “Oh, isn’t she something,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Which one?” I asked, holding out the Rubbermaid container of milk.

  “The one in the red suit. The one who looks like Satan.”

  Jackie was a bit over-the-top, even for Jackie. The red stood out like a suppurating sore amid the other three women, drab and dull in their pastel twinsets. Each wore a strand of pearls, high enough on the neck to look like a collar; Jackie’s chunk of pendant—an owl—dangled between her tits, pushed up by the miracle of modern underwire and padding.

  “I know her,” I said. “Knew her. We were in grad school together.”

  “Grad school,” Olivia repeated. “What did she do?”

  “Sociolinguistics.”

  Olivia snorted but didn’t ask me to explain before she turned back toward the quartet of women and the moderator.

  As usual, Jackie was ranting. “You actually think women should obey their husbands? In the twenty-first century?”

  The woman to her right, the one in the baby blue cardigan, smiled. It was the sort of smile a flustered kindergarten teacher might give to a child throwing a tantrum, a smile full of pity and understanding. You’ll grow out of it, the smile said. “Let me tell you a few things about the twenty-first century, dear,” Ms. Baby Blue Cardigan said. “We don’t know who men are or who women are anymore. Our children are growing up confused. The culture of family has broken down. We have increases in traffic, pollution, autism rates, drug use, single parents, obesity, consumer debt, female prison populations, school shootings, erectile dysfunction. Tha
t’s just to name a few.” She waved a stack of manila folders in front of Jackie as the other two seventies-era Barbie dolls—Pure Women, they called themselves—nodded in somber agreement.

  Jackie ignored the folders. “I suppose the next thing you’ll be telling us is that feminism is at fault for rape?”

  “I’m glad you mentioned that, Miss Juarez,” Baby Blue Cardigan said.

  “Ms.”

  “Whatever. Do you know how many incidents of violent rape were reported in 1960? In the United States.”

  “It’s interesting you use the word ‘reported,’” Jackie began.

  “Seventeen thousand. Give or take. We’re up to five times that number this year.”

  Jackie rolled her eyes, and the other two Pure Women went in for the kill. They had the numbers. They had charts and surveys. One of them introduced a collection of simple pie charts—they must have been organized in advance, I thought—while Jackie fought for airtime.

  On the sofa next to me, Olivia chewed her lower lip. “I had no idea,” she said.

  “No idea about what?”

  “These numbers.” She pointed to one of the charts, now being televised with a prepared voice-over of Baby Blue’s voice. She had moved on from rape and was reciting statistics on antidepressant usage. “Jeez. One in six? That’s awful.”

  No one in the studio audience was paying attention to Jackie’s claims of skewed statistics, of the correlation-causation fallacy, of the fact that of course no one was taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors in 1960, because they didn’t exist.

  That was how it started. Three women with a stack of pie charts and people like Olivia.

  TEN

  It took forever to get Olivia out of the house, her and her goddamned cup of sugar. She probably didn’t even need it and only barged in to stick her nose around, see what I was up to. Olivia has become the purest of Pure Women, always rocking on her porch with her abridged and annotated Bible, always covering up her curls, always smiling and bowing—actually bowing—to Evan when he pulls their Buick into the driveway.